


just troubled

by singmyheart



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Drinking & Talking, F/M, Gen, References to Underage Drinking, annie just wants her spring rolls man idk, i kind of hate this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-25
Updated: 2013-05-25
Packaged: 2017-12-12 21:51:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/816442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singmyheart/pseuds/singmyheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day after graduation he shows up at the door of Apartment 303 with a case of beer, Chinese takeout and an Alfred Hitchcock collection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just troubled

**Author's Note:**

> sort of a series of vignettes throughout jeff's life, starting at thirteen and continuing through "advanced introduction to finality". this is kind of a huge mess but i'm posting it so it stops mocking me argh be nice pls. also available on [my tumblr.](http://rogersbutt.tumblr.com/post/51270674209/fic-just-troubled-jeff-annie)

When Jeff Winger is thirteen he kisses a girl for the first time. She’s his best friend’s little sister and he does it more because she asks him to than out of any real desire on his part. He feels like he should, like it’s about that time in his life. He expects to feel differently afterward; older, more worldly, but all he feels is vaguely ill from the smell of her perfume clinging to his t-shirt.

\--

He celebrates his sixteenth birthday by getting drunk on Strawberry Hill in a friend’s basement (he’s spent much of the intervening years kissing girls. He’s much better at it now). It’s half-dark and loud and thick with the smell of what he will later learn is weed. There’s a girl there, someone’s older cousin or something from out of town, that he’s never met; he tells her he’s eighteen and she believes him. So he smiles, flirts back, talks and talks until he can’t tell what’s true and what isn’t; he’s going to be a lawyer, he’s got his own car, he’s really good at paintball. He refills her drinks before she can ask him to, and if he’s a little heavy-handed he can’t tell.

Jeff pretends the world isn’t spinning when she takes his hand to lead him outside, leaning heavy on his shoulder. He tells her yes, sure, he’s done this before, and she fucks him in his mother’s car while he tries to remember her name.

Afterward, she kisses his cheek, giggles “that was fun,” and he opens the door, leans out and pukes onto the driveway. Her face is instantly a mask of disgust, playfulness gone, and she mutters to herself as she goes inside, wavering, to get someone to drive him home. He lies down in the backseat and waits for the nausea to pass.

When he gets home he pads into the bathroom barefoot so as not to wake his mom up, and gets in the shower, turns the water up almost as hot as it will go and stays in there until his heart is racing and his fingers are pruny, scrubs and scrubs and scrubs at his skin until it’s raw. He brushes his teeth until his gums bleed, falls into bed as the sun is coming up and sleeps the day away.

When his mother asks if he had fun he says “Not really,” and she doesn’t ask.

\--  
Nineteen and he’s in his second year of college, working at Steak n’ Shake a few hours a week. Girls start really noticing him, and he starts noticing girls back. He goes to bed with them and lets them tell him he’s good at it, he’s gorgeous, he’s amazing. He’ll cuddle after with the ones who want to, but they always leave when they realize he isn’t paying attention, that his eyes are far away and he isn’t listening to them speak.

\--  
When he’s twenty he buys his first leather jacket, starts talking his way into bars and ordering scotch and auditions for _The Real World_.

He convinces himself to like scotch because his dad always told him it was a man’s drink. After a while he can swallow it without wincing. _The Real World_ rejects him.

Twenty is not a good year.  
\--  
When he’s twenty-five, things are different.

He has money, he works out. He is attractive, successful, desirable, desired, desiring. He wears bespoke suits, hands people their asses in courtrooms, and he loves it, gorges himself on it. He’s young, the world is his oyster, all those other bullshit clichés. He is Jeff Winger, Attorney at Law, and he’s got business cards that would make Christian Bale cry to prove it. He’s living the dream.

He takes his mother to lunch about once a week, just the two of them. They go for steak, lobster, bottle service, leather booths and dark paneling and mood lighting because they can; Jeff always foots the bill, doesn’t cringe when he signs the check. He will cringe later in life at his younger self, gauche, stupid with money, but twenty-five-year-old Jeff thrives on it.

His mother is always asking what’s wrong with him, insisting that there’s something in his eyes. “Jeffrey, talk to me,” she says, earnest, reaches over the table to take his hand.

“Red or white?” he asks.  
\--  
When he is thirty-one he enrols in community college, tries to pick up the blonde in his Spanish class, fails, and finds himself in a study group that never studies.

When he is thirty-one he has fast, paint-streaked sex with his best friend/partner in crime /fellow Greendale parent on top of a table. He kisses a teenager to win a debate, and again because he doesn’t want her to follow her guitar-playing hacky-sack champion tiny-nipple-having granola douchebag of a boyfriend to the ass end of nowhere, because she’s looking up at him from under her eyelashes and biting her lip a little and because he doesn’t want to be in love with her or with anyone else. He is Jeff Winger, former lawyer, de facto leader of That One Study Group, half of Jeffandbritta.  
\--  
When he is thirty-three Annie Edison is twenty and off-limits.  
\--  
When he is thirty-four he meets his father. When they’re finished Britta is waiting for him in the car: they’re Jeff and Britta now, again, and it’s good. He loves her in the same grudging way he loves Troy and Annie and Abed and Shirley and Pierce; she’s still his best friend and partner in crime and most of the time he doesn’t want to fuck her. So, after standing in a stranger’s living room, showing him his scars and his hurts, Britta is the one who finds him a bar (she flatly refuses to take him to L Street), kisses him on the cheek and leaves with instructions to “call me later and try not to pass out, or your sweater will wrinkle and the world as we know it will end”. Jeff drinks himself into a near-stupor and takes home another woman whose name he instantly forgets. He calls her by the wrong one (but he will deny deny deny that the name he does say sounds anything like _Annie_ , objection, objection) and she slaps him, climbs out of his lap, ignores his stupid, slurred protests, tells him he’s fucked up and an asshole. She leaves him with the slam of the door echoing in his ears, hard and confused. He feels like his insides have been scraped raw. When Annie texts him a while later, you wont believe the day i had., he doesn’t bother to respond.  
\--  
When he is thirty-five he graduates Greendale, finally.

He has one weekend of “what the hell, for nostalgia’s sake” good times with Britta, and then she leaves to backpack across Europe for the summer with Rick/Subway.

The day after graduation he shows up at the door of Apartment 303 with a case of beer, Chinese takeout and an Alfred Hitchcock collection (in his opinion, one of the few weak spots in Abed’s repertoire, which means it’s still pretty exhaustive).

Annie greets him with enthusiasm and immediately launches into an explanation of how Troy and Abed are out for the afternoon and did he get spring rolls and oh, no, is he going to make her watch _Psycho_ again because the explanation scene toward the end always irritates Abed, and come in, sit down, she’ll get napkins.

He follows her into the kitchen, puts everything down, cracks a beer for each of them and when she turns around from the cabinet, leans down and kisses her.

When they separate her eyes stay closed, for a minute, and her brow furrows. “Why are you Clark Gable-ing me?”

“…I’m sorry?”

“That. What you just did. You’re Clark Gable-ing.”

“You spend too much time with Abed,” he says, worriedly.

“No,” she insists, exasperated but smiling, eyes open, “you are. Clark Gable-ing, Frank Sinatra-ing, Rock Hudson-ing. You know?” He must look confused, because she elaborates, “You’re trying too hard. Jeff Winger me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he confesses.

“Yes, you do, dummy,” she’s beaming, eyes bright, “kiss me like Jeff.” She pushes up on her toes, back into his space, arms around his neck, but waits there, waits for him to meet her halfway.

So he leans down again, slower this time, and kisses her more tentatively than he has anyone in his life, like she’ll break if he’s not careful. He feels like she might.

“There you go,” she murmurs against his mouth. “Much better.”

“Food’s getting cold,” is all he can think to say when they separate again.

She laughs, squeezes his hand. They put on _Psycho_ after all, but don’t really watch it, sit on the floor and talk and trade long, lazy kisses that taste like beer and lemon chicken. She ends up in his lap somehow, grinding down just a little against him, and he starts thinking about how short her skirt is and wonders if she’s drunk because he kind of is and whether Abed and Troy are going to walk in any second, pulls away from her for a second to clear his head. “Annie? Hang on.”

She stops touching him immediately, slides out of his lap to tuck her legs demurely underneath her, looks at him in concern but doesn’t press him. Of course she’d know how to handle this. She waits. He swallows.

“I don’t think I can do this.”

“Okay,” she answers, carefully. “Do what?”

The question surprises him. “Uh, this.” He gestures vaguely between them.

“What, the kissing? Do you think I expect to sleep with you, cause we don’t have to do that. Different movie? I can put some music on? Which part?”

“You really are spending too much time with Abed,” he replies, ridiculously.

“Use your words, Winger.”

He sighs. “This – “ again with the gesturing – “I haven’t, really? With people I care about. People I actually like. Kind of new territory for me, here. I’m a little out of my depth.”

“I can’t believe you used to argue for a living.” She shakes her head, but there’s nothing mocking in it. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Is making out okay, then? In, like, a hands-off-bathing-suit-areas kind of way?”

He bites down the urge to answer sarcastically, makes himself look her in the eye. “Yeah, that’s fine. That’s good.”

“Okay, great.” She brightens, finishes her beer and chivvies him back onto the couch, makes him take off his shoes and then there they are, stretched out next to each other, face to face. She presses a kiss to his jaw, fingertips light on his chest, as behind them Simon Oakland explains transvestism to the audience.

Troy and Abed burst in a minute later, singing the Raiders’ March. Jeff freezes, buries his face in her neck. “Shit. I’m flinging myself out your bathroom window, tell Abed I’m my identical twin and I’ve moved to Norway, he’ll know how to get rid of a body, right?”

She cards a hand through his hair, just cranes her neck to see them over the back of the couch. “Hi, guys. Jeff’s here.”

“Hey, Jeff,” they chorus, catch sight of the TV and groan in unison.

“Worst scene in a Hitchcock movie,” Abed says. “Can I have the last spring roll?”

Annie perks up. “There’s one left? No way, I want it.”

Jeff doesn’t understand his life.

“Roshambo?” Abed suggests (Annie’s paper covers his rock and she crows in triumph).

They settle in with their own drinks and plates (Jeff always orders too much) and turn off the last five minutes of _Psycho_ , despite Annie’s protests, to watch something they deem acceptable. Which is how Jeff winds up watching _Star Wars_ for the millionth time with Annie’s legs in his lap and Troy and Abed quoting along with the dialogue.

By the time Darth Vader orders Alderaan destroyed and Jeff is definitely not dozing off, he’s mildly surprised to find he’s enjoying himself. Thirty-five is turning out better than he thought it would.


End file.
